Keep Your Earphones From Tangling in your pocket. No matter how carefully you store a pair of earphones into your pocket, they emerge crazy tangled. Why does this happen? Is there anyway to avoid the tangling? Some scientist at UC San Diego unraveled the mystery of headphones tangling in a study titled “Spontaneous Knotting of an Agitated String” which won them an Ignobel Prize in 2008. The researchers put in a box strings of different length and rotated it. Then they opened the box to see if knots had formed. After over 3,000 trials, they identified a number of factors that lead to entanglement, the length of the cord being the first. A string shorter than 46 cm never tangled, but as the string gets longer, the probability of getting knots increases sharply. This is why a 3 meter long Christmas tree lights can melt your soul. So using earphones...
A fictional movie is very entertaining; however, movies can also make people pick up misconceptions. Here there are some of the more common movie plots that twist the truth. A cigarette end can’t set petrol on fire. Watched on: Zoolander, The Usual Suspects, Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. In dozens of films and TV programmes major explosions are started, either accidentally or deliberately, by a cigarette dropped into petrol. Researchers at America’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, did some tests at their Maryland laboratories. This government department conducted 2,000 attempts to start a fire from exposed petrol using a cigarette. They dropped cigarettes of different brands into the petrol to see if this made any difference. But the petrol did not ignite. Actually, in the film industry they are pretty well aware of it. They don’t care. Despite what you see in action movies, dropping a lighted...
Chocolate is healthier than you think. Chocolate comes from cocoa, which comes from a tree, that makes it a plant. Therefore, chocolate counts as salad! Just joking, but despite its fame chocolate has some healthy properties not so well known: The smell of chocolate increases theta brain waves, which triggers relaxation. Eating a bar of chocolate may cheer you up, but smelling it calms you down, says a British psychologist. Neil Martin, a psychologist at Middlesex University, asked 60 volunteers to sit in a room wearing goggles and headphones while smelling different scents. He used electroencephalography to record their brain waves during the process. Half the volunteers were smelling real foods, while the others experienced synthetic smells. The real foods included chocolate, coffee, baked beans and rotting pork. But apart from chocolate, the smells had little effect on the subjects. Chocolate produced “theta” brain...
